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January 15

Internet search engine with working exact search feature

Up to last week I was able to do an exact internet search using DuckDuckGo with the +"search term" +"another search term" syntax. Google has lost this essential feature already several years before and Bing followed later. Is there any publicly available search engine still supporting exact searches ? (Exact search means that all the results must contain all the serch terms or a "no results" message is returned.) -- Juergen 134.255.193.13 (talk) 09:52, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nobody does that any more. The result set is now always the entire internet, and your qery terms only influence what order the results are presented in. The technical reason it is done this way now is explained here but I agree, the old way for the most part was better. 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk) 03:18, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the insight 2602:24A:DE47:B8E0:1B43:29FD:A863:33CA (talk · contribs · WHOIS). I've tried quoting text and using plus signs end even underscores and didn't understand why DDG failed to restrict searches to the relevant ones. Are there any search engines that offer straight-forward text searches anymore? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 10:48, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Can you give an example of such terms that Google/DDG are not respecting? Searching +"Welcome to the computing reference desk." +"Want a faster answer?" on Google brings up this page and its various mirrors only, as it should. As the second phrase is found on every reference desk page, the fact that Google only pulls up the computing reference desk shows that it searched for both terms exactly. If I replace some of those words in the search with gibberish, it correctly displays no results. Pinguinn 🐧 14:08, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's true that most modern search engines do not always respect supposedly required terms, but it's more complicated than the IP suggests. Your example is one of them, but also '"meow" "tsunami" "musk" "jacinda" "google" "bing"' currently returns 19 search results on Google for me. But as an example for why it's complicated '"meow" "woof" "kitten" "tiger" "volcano" "earthquake" "tsunami" "musk" "jacinda" "google" "bing"' which has the same search terms and more returns 28 results. Nil Einne (talk) 14:36, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Of course Google's results also depend on other things hence why [1] returns 32 results, although [2] still does 19. Note that most of those are words lists or have other junk if not visible then embedded in the page so do have all search terms. So it's possible all do have the search terms, but there are definitely cases when Google decides to ignore your quotation marks and assume something is close enough. See also this discussion [3]. I think one of the reason my search terms possibly didn't get anything else is because there simply wasn't anything that Google was able to decide I might want instead. Nil Einne (talk) 14:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That referred link does explain how some search engine might work but it does not at all explain why they all desupported the exact search feature, which means not to do any alias interpretation and not to correct any possible misspellings but only to search for the words as input. Or did I miss something ? -- Juergen 217.61.206.150 (talk) 23:19, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]